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If this really is going to be a 10 year development I expect there will be lots of occurrences where stuff like this needs to happen

As you know we spend a good deal of time planning for the future, and one issue (and opportunity) we are considering is the effect of supporting monitors and 64bit OS's, and the benefits we would get if we were to drop them. As you know, we support leading edge technology like 16K, 32K, RI-VR, and with things like quantum shaders in the Gateway expansion series we really push the boundaries overall. Dropping these two would help us support RI-VR (Retinal Implant Virtual Reality) – to make the game better.

Stealth season 3 release timeframe? With two major updates to go after 2.2 hopefully sometime in October, that sounds resaonable.

Anyway, good to have the notice, but it sounds very reasonable to drop the legacy support after such a notice has been issued half a year beforehand. Less dev force for legacy support and more for pushing on!

Its so small percentage and technology develops and so do people machines at the same time, so percentage still drops. 64 bit CPU, 64 bit windows versions, and DX11 GPU is all allready been there for years and you can get those fair cheap. To my point of view it takes time from game develop and donwngrade game, considering those arguments i really dont think thats wise by anymeans to go backwards, just go ahead.

This seems like a reasonable choice to make, to me... DX11 is getting on for seven years old now, so if anyone did need to upgrade their graphics card (the worst case), they could do so for minimal cost.
The first Nvidia graphics cards to support DX11 were the GTX 4xx series, for AMD the HD 5xxx series. These cards are 6+ years old, and anyone running anything older probably isn't getting an amazing ED experience to begin with!

As for Win32... Same deal, except 64-bit CPUs have been common since... what, 2006? I think it's fair to move forwards, especially if we're talking about 0.5% of people who have ever launched ED.

I can definitely believe that dropping these "legacy" builds and code paths would allow FD to simplify things and improve performance, especially going forwards with new features, whatever order those appear in.

Given the XBONE support I suspect DX12 is required. That said, Elite also has MacOSX support and Vulcan supports that. What does PS4 support require, I wonder..

ED support OS X for Season 1 - using OpenGL 3.3 basically. for Horizons and upwards they need OpenGL 4.3, DirectX 11 equal, because of compute shaders. Vulkan *doesn't* support OS X at level ED requires (it is merely a glue framework by third party so you can port mobile games from Vulkan to Metal). Nor Apple plans to support OpenGL beyond 4.1.

PS4 has their own high level and low level language and shader language similar to DirectX 11.

So basically DirectX12 support just benefits Windows 10 and XBO. DX11 is still required. So pushing for DX12 is just not practical yet. Neither for Vulkan to be frank - although as Linux user I would welcome that

Before Windows 10 I was an aggressive Windows hater in general and openly supporting (and still using) Linux. Windows 10 has largely changed that, can't even say Linux is generally "better" than Windows anymore. So from my point of view this hate is pretty much irrational.

That was also me a few years ago.

DirectX12 & Vulkan are clearly the future for pc gaming. I hope that linux and mac os will gain from this as they support vulkan too (and by extension, so do Android and iOs).